In the summer of 2016, at the age of 33 years, I found myself in an extremely difficult situation. I developed symptoms of a constant low-grade fever, chills, pain in my lower back and side flank, and frequent urination. Over multiple visits to urologists and diagnostic testing, I was diagnosed with chronic bacterial prostatitis. To treat this condition, the urologist put me on multiple courses of oral and IV antibiotics. After months of antibiotic courses, the symptoms from my prostatitis condition remained as they were, and side effects like indigestion and digestive distress from the prolonged courses of antibiotics started kicking in. I found myself at a dead end when after a particularly difficult ‘heavy artillery’ course of antibiotics – IV Amikacin and oral Ciprofloxacin – my doctor declared my infection to be antibiotic resistant. He said I would now have to think of my problem from the perspective of symptom management and learn to live with it, rather than think of it as something from which I could recover.
As a young person in my early 30s, this was an unacceptable situation to be in. I could not imagine living a life with such crippling symptoms, which were not allowing me to do anything which a normal 30-year-old could do like putting in a full work day, travelling, or even being able to sit for longer than 30 minutes. I internalized that I would not be able to find a successful treatment for my condition with antibiotics, and started researching alternative ways of treating bacterial infections. My eureka moment came when I read about phage therapy in a paper published in a scientific journal. I devoted the next 3-4 months of my life to learning everything that I could about phage therapy. I read every paper on phage therapy in medical and scientific journals, and learnt the science and history behind this simple, elegant and natural solution to target bacterial infections. After learning of the ability of phages to break down bacterial biofilms, their ability to multiply at the site of an infection, and their ability to treat multi-drug resistant infections, I knew that this could be the solution that could give me a way out from the end that I was stuck in.
I opened communication with the Eliava Institute’s clinic and 2 months later I was headed there for my treatment. Comprehensive diagnostic testing revealed that my infection was multi-bacterial, with Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus haemolyticus, Streptococcus mitis and Enterococcus faecalis. After my first course of treatment that lasted more than 10 weeks, I was symptomatically much better and some of my symptoms like the constant fever and chills and frequent urination were completely resolved. My treatment continued through most of 2017 with a second and third course of treatment, each lasting 10-12 weeks. At the end of my third and last course of phage therapy, all pathogenic bacteria had been cleared and the leukocyte counts in my prostate fluid samples had come down from a high of 60 to less than 5, into the normal range.
After the successful treatment of my condition with phage therapy, I started writing about my experience in an online blog and started speaking to health editors of major newspapers and magazines about my experience with phage therapy. In early 2018, I founded an initiative called ‘Vitalis Phage Therapy’ with my wife with the aim of raising awareness about antibiotic resistance and phage therapy, and to make phage therapy available and accessible as a treatment for patients suffering from antibiotic resistant infections.
Over the years, we have undertaken steps towards our aim of increasing awareness and access to phage therapy in India. In 2020, we collaborated with one of the top diagnostic labs in the country to introduce diagnostics with phage sensitivity testing. This has reduced the time, complexity and cost for diagnostic testing that is required before starting phage treatment. Since 2021, we have been authoring case reports and case studies of patients undergoing phage therapy treatments in India. Some of these papers have been published in top scientific journals like Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2023, we started collaborating with medical institutions in India, enabling them to provide phage therapy for their patients suffering from multi-drug resistant infections. Since we started Vitalis Phage Therapy in 2018, we have enabled more than 250 patients from India to undertake phage therapy for treating their antibiotic resistant infections.